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Ndingangakhe
ndisitheleKwimpazamo
zonkeNdibe
nemizuzu ndedwa ekuthandazeni I didn’t
know how to write about Lalela and my experience of visiting this place until I
read a chapter from bell hook’s Belonging:
a culture of place. My friend and her partner live on a farm in
Magaliesburg. They named the farm Lalela and opened it up for friends to visit
and experience life differently from city life. I have been here for almost
three weeks and I came with the sole purpose of finding some peace and quiet.
And I have experienced it in abundance. In her
chapter “Touching the earth” bell reflects on the relationship she has with the
earth. I had read this essay when I first read the book but the essay reads
differently now that I have experienced what bell writes about beyond the
initial reading and understanding. Here are a few extracts from the essay which
resonate with what I have experienced at Lalela as well as what has emerged in
the conversations I’ve had with other people who have been a…

2017 is almost over and
I made the decision to end 2017 and begin 2018 with a sort of retreat. I write
this while in Magaliesburg at a farm called Lalela (I'll write a long post
about it at the end of the experience). I could have gone to India but instead I
felt I needed to stop and rest (being a tourist in India would not have been
stopping nor restful). I've had quite a busy year: I started a new job in January, I
registered for a PhD, I’ve been attending conferences and speaking at public
events more than ever, I decided to support a friend to start a school in January 2018 amongst a litany of other experiences which were both public and private.
Like many people; it's been a year.

The end of the year is
always a time of much flurry with end of year celebrations, holidays, family
time etc. By choosing to literally retreat from all the end of year buzz means
I have three weeks of nature, good food, good company and lots of time to think
and reflect.
While 'tis the s…

I’m
currently reading Robert Young’s Colonial desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race and I’ve been taking pictures
of interesting excerpts which are making me rethink culture. Thus far (I’m
still reading the book) I’m beginning to wonder how Africans thought about
difference amongst different groups of people before the catastrophe of
Western/European colonialism. These
thoughts have led me back to Prof Archie Mafeje’s paper The ideology of tribalism where he makes an argument questioning
the origins of the word tribe and how it came to be accepted that ‘tribalism’
is a part of the African experience (in anthropology in particular). He begins
the paper with the statement: Few authors
have been able to write on Africa without making constant reference to
'tribalism'. This suggests that tribalism has become to be an essential
part of how we describe Africa and make sense of the differences amongst
different people in Africa. Mafeje continues by posing the questions: Could t…

Recently
I was searching for clues about Noni Jabavu’s life and I stumbled upon the pages of the 1935
edition of The Bantu World. I became intrigued by the representation of black
women in the newspaper through a series of articles under the title “Bantu
women on the move”. By exploring the archives of The Bantu World black women’s multiple identities begin to emerge
providing an answer to the question posed by Nomboniso Gasa in the book Women in South African History: “Where
are black women, their multiple voices and multiple forms of
self-representation, which are often far from the ‘heroic’ subject and more
along the lines of fighting for survival and struggling for dignity and
self-expression?” It is important to contextualize The Bantu World and its significance during the 1930s. In Les
Switzer’s Bantu World and the origins of
a captive African commercial press in South Africa, hedescribes
the context of a reading culture in the 1930s by stating that “literate
Africans constituted…